Biden signs executive order to advance women’s health research

President Joe Biden has signed an executive order aimed at improving women’s health research across the federal government.

The president issued the order at a White House Women’s History Month event, where he was joined by First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and former first lady of California Maria Shriver.

The order allocates US$12bn to and marks the “most comprehensive set” of executive action to advance research on women’s health.

According to the White House, the investment would be used to create a Fund for Women’s Health Research at the National Institutes of Health and to establish a nationwide network of research centres of excellence and innovation in women’s health.

These directives would ensure women’s health is integrated and prioritised across the federal research portfolio and budget and would galvanise new research on a wide range of topics, including women’s midlife health.

However, the investment is not guaranteed. Given Congress has the “power of the purse,” lawmakers can move to deny the president his funding.

“So now that the President has done his job, we have to do ours,” Shriver told journalists at the event.

“We have to get Congress to approve the US$12bn investment this president has called for to implement this bold vision.”

Women’s health has long been underfunded and underresearched. Historically, medical studies have excluded female participants and research data have been collected from males and generalised to females. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the federal government mandated women be included in federally funded medical research.

“We still know too little about how to effectively prevent, diagnose and treat a wide array of health conditions in women,” said Dr Carolyn Mazure, the head of the White House initiative on women’s health.

Biden’s new executive order, according to the White House, is hoped to integrate and prioritise women’s health across various federal agencies, fuel new research, and order the Office of Management and Budget and the Gender Policy Council to assess gaps in federal funding.

In addition, the White House said Biden and first lady Dr Jill Biden would be announcing over 20 actions and commitments being taken by several federal agencies. This would include the launch of a new effort from the National Institute of Health to direct “key investments” of US$200m to fund new, interdisciplinary women’s health research.

These actions, it said, build on the First Lady’s announcement last month of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Sprint for Women’s Health, which committed US$100m towards research and development in women’s health.